Return to Sender

Episode #596: “I needed to find another way... through research, writing, education, mentoring, community work,” says CS Kyaw, a Myanmar-born doctor turned development researcher now based in Australia. She argues that Myanmar’s future depends not only on financial support from abroad but also on social remittances, the transfer of knowledge, skills, values, and relationships across borders that allow displaced Myanmar people to continue contributing even when returning home is unsafe.

Originally trained in medicine and public health, Kyaw worked in Myanmar’s nonprofit sector before receiving an Australia Awards scholarship to study development at the University of Melbourne. Her work convinced her that health could not be understood through medicine alone. While serving as an outreach doctor, she saw neighboring villages with strikingly different access to education and healthcare because of unequal resources and opportunities. The experience led her to see well-being as inseparable from broader social and political conditions.

The 2021 military coup became another turning point. It overturned her plans and forced her to ask how she could continue serving Myanmar when she could no longer do so safely inside the country. That question led her toward research, education, mentoring, community work, transnationalism, and social remittances. Now living in Australia as an asylum seeker, she identifies as a “transmigrant,” someone whose identity and responsibilities continue across borders.

Kyaw puts these ideas into practice by volunteering with refugee and migrant women through the River Nile Learning Centre, co-founding Mohinga Hub for Myanmar diaspora communities, and teaching through Spring University Myanmar, while acknowledging the funding, security, and volunteer challenges these initiatives face.

She also reflects on tensions between Myanmar communities inside and outside the country, the decolonization of language and knowledge, and the importance of local voices in education, research, and advocacy. Throughout the interview, she returns to the values that unite her work—dignity, equality, knowledge, community, and freedom. Asked to describe Myanmar’s future in one word, she says, “hope.”